The gist of the article is Clifford feels such fondness and affinity to Francis Oakley that he sees a certain synchronicity that aligns his life with Oakley's. Both of them, for example, once rescued horses.
Finally, on a lighter note—that of odd coincidences—is a little domestic tale about the Oakley family horse, whose screams one night brought the whole family out to untangle the poor animal from some webbing that was entrapping her. I can’t help wondering if that was about the same time when, a hundred miles north of Williamstown, screams from our own family horse brought out me and my wife and our four pajama-clad girls, they holding flashlights while I managed somehow to cut away the bits of wire fence that had caught up Irish Maid’s right hind leg. This was one of many coincidences in this book that sometimes made me feel as if I had encountered not just a kindred spirit but a parallel life.Nevertheless, Clifford does do us a service by recounting how Oakley, a Catholic, critiqued the doctrine of papal absolutism as ahistorical as part of a larger liberal attack on the Catholic Church. Simultaneously, in his scholarship, Oakley helped lead changes at Williams College which were designed to update the institution. This is the aggriornamenti described in the title of the article. Aggriornamenti is simply a Latin term for bringing something up-to-date.
Over Oakley's time at Williams College, Clifford reports that "Oakley watched the 'old Williams' (as he calls it), with its WASPy ways and fraternity traditions, giving way to new concerns brought on by the civil-rights movement, the Vietnam war, and the rise of student protests."
Before we turn Francis Oakley into an icon of academic enlightenment, however, we might spend a moment or two remembering the people he harmed along the way. In particular, we might want to hear from the enemies he created by bringing about affirmative action policies which discriminated against young white male scholars and students.
Oakley was part of a generation of liberals who decided that their academic institutions were too white. As they brainstormed solutions to the "whiteness" problem, it never occurred to them to resign their cushy academic jobs to make room for new, younger minority scholars. Instead, leaders like Oakley decided it was better to force the costs of their policies on to unsuspecting young white male and female graduate students who, after years of hard work and often pitiful poverty, were seeking their first jobs in the academic world. Oakley was among those who were the first to suggest to these white graduate students: "Sorry you're white."
Over the years, Oakley has been indifferent and insensitive to the suffering he caused for the real people he hurt and harmed by promoting and signing off on affirmative action programs at Williams College.
Today, one of Francis Oakley's legacies is that Williams College is filled with a surprising amount of anti-white hate.
One April 9, 2019, for example, the College Council allowed two black activist students to engage in a long, videoed, bigoted anti-white rant against young white students whose only real sin was a desire to follow the rules. As far as I can tell, neither of the black, CARE Now activists were ever punished for their racially motivated verbal abuse of their fellow students.
As future generations look back on the mistreatment of young whites at Williams College, Francis Oakley's contribution to all that anti-white hate will need to be assessed and put into context. I suspect his responsibility for the pain he caused the innocent victims of his aggriornamenti - both in the past and now - will certainly be a factor as we evaluate his application for academic sainthood.
John C. Drew, Ph.D., is a former Williams College professor in American politics and political economy. He contributes to American Thinker, Breitbart, Campus Reform, The College Fix, and WorldNetDaily.
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